*Eddie Murphy’s foray into reggae via the song “Oh Jah Jah” topped the reggae chart on iTunes, and now there’s a video for it.
Murphy released the song four months ago after revealing he was now focusing his energy on being a reggae artist.
The Richard Gumbs III-directed music video has the entertainer simply performing the laid-back tune in the studio.
Watch below:
In January, Rolling Stone asked Murphy if a full reggae album was in his future.
“If people respond to [“Oh Jah Jah”], then I might. If people don’t, that sh*t will just stay on the shelf where it’s at. And I’m cool with that. I’m cool with all my sh*t being on the shelf until 100 years from now. Everything comes out 100 years from now,” Murphy said. “Any artist that did anything, once you’re gone, they go looking through all your sh*t. Like this scrap of paper that you drew on. If I’m doing a movie or if I’m going onstage, that’s me being funny. But music, I do that all the time, for free.”
Despite the Rastafarian iconography in both the “Oh Jah Jah” video and lyrics, Murphy proclaimed, “I’m not a Rasta. I’m doing a reggae track, reggae artists they say Jah, so I said Jah. I can call God Jah and not be a Rasta. The lyrics lent itself to this whole reggae feel.”
Murphy added that a pair of major news stories in 2014 inspired “Oh Jah Jah.”
“I wrote that track the first week that Ebola jumped off, and Ferguson was going on – it was pulled out of the headlines,” Murphy said. “To say this stuff, it has to be reggae. You can’t touch on none of this with an R&B track, because people will shut down to it. But do a roots reggae song that feels like Bob Marley type of stuff, you can say it.”
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